[From the diaries -- Hunter]
For a journalist worthy of the name, nothing beats a good story, well told. And for an investigative journalist, nothing beats a good story, well told that brings grief to the target of the investigation.
Does that seem unobjective? I don't think so. Boiled down, the investigative journalist's role is to find out if somebody or some institution did something bad or criminal or way outside normal parameters and inform the public about it. Totally objective. Did they, or didn't they put toxic chemicals in the lake at midnight, steal millions from their shareholders, make a lucrative deal with a crook, damage the health of their employees, get caught in a lie about what they knew when, or run a plausibly deniable dirty tricks operation to further a political agenda? Yes. Or no.
Not that it's always easy to get there. But, easy or not, when it happens: party time. Celebrate the work, enjoy the victory of focusing where people wanted things blurry, down a Tequila or three in honor of the target's embarrassment, indictment or resignation. Loud cheers, back-pats all round. Then, like an addiction, on to the next target.
As with so much in the blogworld, the investigation by Daily Kos Diarists and Media Matters that just popped Mr. Guckert out of his propaganda post as Karl Rove's pull-string doll arose and evolved and came to spectacular fruition at warp speed. OK, partial fruition. I know SusanG and NYBri and all you others are far from done yet, and the megamedia still don't get it or, as in the case of Wolf Blitzer at least, don't want to get it. But two weeks' of intense, cooperative work has yielded more than many investigative journalists produce in six months. That's not laziness on the part of the pros. Think how many hours were expended before something definitive and relevant could be said about Mr. Guckert.
A few real investigative teams exist in the mainstream newspaper and broadcast world. I'm particularly partial to the folks at the
Toledo Blade, the
Winston-Salem Journal, and the
Center for Investigative Reporting myself. But, most places, if there's any management zeal for investigative journalism at all, it's usually expressed in the funding of one, or at most, two people, who do half the job on their own time. And, as the Diarists have learned, just getting started can take hundreds of hours. Dead-end leads can steal days, or more.
I know it will be interesting and, I hope, heartening, to watch how what happened here the past couple of weeks evolves. Even in the accelerated mode we live in, it's a little early, not to mention pretentious, to say this is a new investigative paradigm. But it certainly seems to be part of one. I can't keep from thinking: how can this fresh alternative not change journalism for the better? Dare I say, America?
I guess I should just hold my horses, since these investigators don't yet even have a name for themselves. As I've said elsewhere, "blograker" resonates for me as a morph of "muckraker," though I can understand why this grates on others.
"Muckraker" is the name Teddy Roosevelt gave - with a sneer - to the investigators of his day. Many muckrakers of the time weren't comfortable with the label. But that is what they did. Dredged through the muck of governmental and plutocratic lies and misbehavior and dared to write about it. They were unabashedly partisan and relentless, one-person reform machines with a forum. Sometimes, the public outcry over their exposés generated positive change, sometimes their findings were ignored. Most of them attracted legions of nasty and powerful critics, who nevertheless found them exceedingly hard to shut up. Lincoln Steffens, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Charlotte Gilman, Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, I.F. Stone, and their more modern counterparts, Seymour Hersh, Michael Moore, David Kay Johnston, Richard O'Reilly, Greg Palast, Gary Webb, Phoebe Zerwick. Passionate, relentless and, while unrepentantly partisan, eager to uncover the truth and to lower the boom on the liars and thugs, no matter how high their status or scary their threats.
Unintended negative consequences sometimes resulted from their efforts. A quarter century before Roosevelt coined the term, Helen Hunt Jackson's tireless agitating and muckraking about the treatment of American Indians culminated in her scathing A Century of Dishonor, which came out in 1881. She sent a copy to every Congressman with the inscription: "Look upon your hands: They are stained with the blood of your relations." She gained some fame, even a special government appointment, but no reform. Her syrupy novel Ramona, set among California Mission Indians, was a different matter. Ironically, this best-selling romance was a key factor in the passage of the "reformist" Dawes Act of 1887, another in a series of policies that separated Indians from their land and culture.
Upton Sinclair busted the meat-packing industry. Ida Tarbell blew the lid off the Standard Oil Company. Ray Stannard Baker challenged the color divide.
I.F. Stone, whose name rightwankers tried to taint after his death, dug through the obscurantese of agate-print federal documents to provide the readers of I.F. Stone's Weekly a pre-Internet, hard-copy blog that mixed sharp leftist opinion about civil rights and foreign policy - particularly Vietnam - with exposés documented via the government's own paperwork. Sound familiar?
Seymour Hersh worked the shoe leather and the phones to write the story of Song My and My Lai but couldn't get a single outlet to publish it until tiny Dispatch News Service picked it up and peddled it for $100 a pop. Like his predecessors and his contemporaries, he's had dry spells, and then he brings frowns to the faces of officialdom with investigations like that he did on Abu Ghraib.
Only surpassed by Frederick Douglass, these folks top my list of heroes. For a few years, they inspired me to imitate them in a modest way in modest publications. Then life, as life does, took a different turn.
While it lasted, only one thing was as satisfying, personally and politically and professionally as seeing weeks or months - one time a year - of investigative work coalesce into an exposé. In 1977, I brought to light the nascent network of rightwing legal operations epitomized by the Joe Coors-funded Mountain States Legal Foundation, writing the first one-on-one interview with the organization's founding president, James G. Watt, soon to be one of Ronald Reagan's worst appointments. In 1983, a month before Reagan gave his famous Strategic Defense Initiative speech, my colleague S.K. Levin and I wrote a 5-part series regarding impending plans to militarize space, the first such detailed look published outside technical journals. The outcome? MSLF obviously is still doing yeoman's duty for the anti-environmental movement. And while Ronnie's version of Star Wars got reshaped a tad after dozens of investigative writers and scientists pummeled it, the idea and money for it are still flowing prodigiously.
What, then, was more satisfying than seeing a hard-won exposé come off the presses? The same thing that gave so many of Daily Kos Diarists big grins this week: toppling the target.
I'm was fortunate enough to snag a couple of those, too. One came about when I investigated the doings at Uravan, Colorado, in 1980. Ura(nium)Van(adium), that is, a mill town wholly owned by Union Carbide near the Utah border. Mill work had polluted the river and land, millions of tons of saturated, ultra-fine uranium tailings perched precariously on a mesa threatening to bury the 600 residents, the health clinic was built on radioactive tailings and the company was four years overdue for renewing its operating license. Within two months after my first story appeared, the official investigation got underway, which eventually led to the place's shutdown and clean-up. A year later, my two-part series about the Federal Emergency Management Agency's ludicrous plan to evacuate Americans to rural areas in case of imminent nuclear war led to a local public outcry that spread nationally, brought 60 Minutes to town, and ultimately led to the squelching of the whole idea, one that Robert Scheer devastatingly attacked in With Enough Shovels.
Nothing made me more gleeful than the day the Union Carbide public relations exec called me a "muckraker." Wore it like an invisible badge.
But enough, I'm sure you'll agree, about me. It's a new world. New villains, new investigators, and new tools and technology to help spotlight the dark forces. So a fresh name is appropriate, and NYBri 's thread seeks suggestions. Mine remains "blograker," linked to the past and focused on the future. But, hey, any good name will do; it's the good work that counts. I have high hopes we'll get to see a lot more of what came down this week.
Which, finally, brings me to four bits of advice.
First. Investigators make enemies. It could hardly be otherwise. The muckraker, blograker, digger-out-of-inconvenient-facts doesn't make nice to the Powers That Be for a career-boosting spoonful of pabulum. They cause trouble. Their enemies may merely curse being exposed or may react more ... harshly. Attempts to damage reputations, as well as more legal forms of harassment, sometimes ensue. Whether it succeeds or not, we won't know for a while, but cooperative blog journalism - open source, as Kos would call it - has the potential to become a powerful weapon against disinformation and political shenanigans. Thus, its practitioners should count themselves as possible targets. Watch your back.
Second. As deserving of our opprobrium as many journalists are, some people in the profession are damned good at what they do, and their experience can prove valuable. For example, the people at Investigative Reporters and Editors have a valuable resource center including a searchable database of 20,000 investigative stories. If you're in or near Denver, or plan to be in early June, think about attending the 2005 IRE conference. If you find the proceedings too tame, liven them up.
Third. Don't get reckless. I noted on another thread yesterday that it's only been when I temporarily hit my skepticism's off-switch that I've been burned. I don't mean round-the-clock skepticism about the target of an investigation; that's a given. Rather, what emerges in the natural desire to take a story to the next level is the temptation to let go of the skepticism about something which fits your preconceived notions, some lead or tip that seems congruent with everything you've learned so far, some little piece of information that completes a puzzle seemingly to perfection, some datum that comes from a source who has done right by you before. Exhaustion or exuberance (or maybe the urge to get a story out before somebody else does) has led some of the best reporters to take something from somebody they trust at face value without proper vetting. That can be disastrous.
Fourth. Like so much else in the world, investigatory victories are ephemeral. Once you gain an audience, it's always going to be what-have-you-done-for-us-lately.